“What do you want?”
“Nothin’, only I’m much obleeged to you for this black bottle—here’s luck!—you can charge the price in the next bill of costs you git agin me.”
The discomfited Sheriff could stand this jeering from the Captain no longer, so he put spurs to his horse and left.
“Now,” murmured Suggs, “let me depart in peace, for thar’s no chance to ketch up with me now!—Cuss the hole—and yonder’s a horsin’ log!
“Well, the wicked flee when no man pursueth; wonder what they’d do if they had that black rascal, Martin Ellis, after ’em, on that infernal long-legged bay? Durn the luck! thar’s that new saddle that I borrowed from the Mississippi feller—which he’ll never come back for it—that’s lost in the mill creek!—jist as good as ten dollars out of my pocket. Well, it’s no use ’sputin’ with providence—hit will purvide!
“The Grand Jurors of the State of Alabama,” he continued, soliloquizing in the verbiage of an indictment; “elected, sworn, and charged—darned rascals all, with Jim Bulger at the head!—to inquire for the body of Tallapoosa County—durn their hearts! it’s my body they’re after!—upon their oaths present—confound them!—that Simon Suggs—hem! that’s me, but they might’ve put the ‘Captain’ to it, though!—late of said County—just as if I warn’t one of the fust settlers, which I was here, afore they had a sign of a Court-House!
“Well, it’s no use thinkin’ about the lyin’ thing; I’ll have to go Hadenskeldt, at Court, to get me out’n the suck. Now, he’s a quar one, ain’t he? Never got him to do any law job for me yet but what I had to pay him—drot the feller. Anybody would think ’twas as hard to git money from me as ’tis for a man to draw a headless tenpenny nail out’n an oak post with his teeth—but that little black-headed lawyer makes a ten, or a twenty, come every pop!
“Wonder how fur ’tis down to the bend? This creek makes into the river about a mile below it, they say. Never mind, thar’s a few drinks of the ipsydinxy left, and the menajerie won’t open to-day. I judge if my old woman knowed whar I was goin’, and who I was goin’ to see, she’d make the yeath shake. But she don’t know; it’s a prinsippel that Providence has put into the bosom of a man—leastways all sensible men—to run on and talk a heap afore their wives, to make ’em believe they’re turnin’ wrong-side out before ’em and yet never tell ’em the fust word of truth. It’s a wise thing in providence, too. Wonder, if I’ll ketch that rascal Jim Sparks jewlarkin’ round Betsy, down at old Bob’s!”
On the morning after the occurrence of the adventure we have related, Captain Suggs sat in a long trim-built Indian canoe, which was moored to the north bank of the Tallapoosa river. Near him was Miss Betsy Cockerell. She sat facing the Captain, on a board laid across the gunwales of the boat. Miss Betsy was a bouncing girl, plump, firm, and saucy, with a mischievous rolling eye, and a sharp word for ever at her tongue’s end. She seemed to be coquetting with the paddle she held in her hand, and occasionally would strike it on the water, so as to besprinkle Captain Suggs, much to his annoyance.
“Oh, Captin, you do persuade me to promise you so hard. And Jim Sparks says you’re married; and if you ain’t you mought ’a been, twenty years ago; you’re old enough.”—(splash!)